Vicar Grimes leaned back in his chair, looking at his hand of cards.  His only remaining opponent was a pale woman in ragged highway leathers and of indeterminate age, pink mohawk haphazardly stuck into place.  She had that wasteland look about her, and he wondered why they let her into a nice drug den like this one, where all the respectable citizens went to huff pump or space out on gamma sunrise.  She kept looking at the door to the back room behind him, and he didn't like it.  He also didn't like the baseball bat with nails sticking out of it that was leaning against the table.

"You Postalists," she said, dropping a handful of foil-coated protein chips on the table to join the pile of food-money in the pot, "You promise deliverance, rain or shine, but I only ever see you down here in the muck with the rest of us.  5Ͼ, call."

Grimes grinned.  "The Messiah is real, good daughter, and She has Shipped from the Sorting Facility.  See that when She comes, you are not Returned to Sender."  He laid out his hand.  "Three of a kind," he said, momentarily confident with the smarm of a decent hand.

The wastelander looked at her cards with a slight twinge of a smile; the vicar's heart dropped.  Before she said anything, though, there was a blast of hot air as the door behind him blew inward.  The woman immediately flipped the table on top of Grimes, sending chips rolling everywhere, just before a shotgun blast speckled the wall behind where the vicar's head had been seconds before.  Junkies scattered, either avoiding the shotgun or going after the chips.  Another blast boomed out.

There was a scuffling noise and a couple sickening crunches followed by blood pooling around Grimes, pinned under the table.  The wasteland woman pulled the weight off of Grimes and he looked around.  A strung out wasteoid, with wet-looking tattoos indicating some Gas Hog gang, lay on the floor, their face a mass of disfiguring gashes.  The stub shotgun lay next to the door. The wastelander held that nasty bat loosely, blood dripping from the spikes.

"We were lucky the Wicked Pork only sent one wasteoid this time, padre," she said.  "Grab the shotty and let's go.  I have to bring you to the Rend Zev Us."

Grimes frowned and asked, "Who ARE you?" as he scrambled to grab the sawed-off, kneeing a drug addict in the face in the process when they got too close to the gun.

The woman grinned, her incisors filed to sharp points.  "I'm Janet, from Marketing, of course."

____________________________________________________________________________________________

So I was talking to John Baltisberger yesterday (keep an eye out for that Wandering Monster interview), and I mentioned a bit of the lore of Wasteland Degenerates, and he asked me why so little of the gonzo facts about the wasteland made it into the campaign so far.  I think that, because this is just the character generation and combat sections of the greater Wasteland Degenerates tome, you'll only get hints of the factions, monsters, and cataclysmic events that will complicate your degenerates' lives when the full game is out.

So to give sneak peaks into the craziness ahead, I've decided to write a bit of short fiction using the Official Job Board of the Apocalypse, the mission generator that will ultimately ship with the hardcover.  Now that you've been introduced to Janet From Marketing, I'll roll up her adventures randomly.  When you see an asterisk (*) that is a point where I rolled the next event using one of the many, many tables from the book.  Let's do a short one...
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Janet signed and looked at the hooded figure, trying to figure out what cult* she belonged to.  Hole Rollerz?  Postal Apostates?  Tothtec?  She shuddered at that last one.  Tothtec were bad news.  Well, worse news.  Everything was bad, all of the time.  Especially here in Blacksand Reach*, a whole city of blasted derelict buildings and scrapped vehicles.

"I've been paid by Baron Tao* of the Skidmark Weasels* to make sure Janet From Marketing does the deed," the raspy cultist said.  Great, thought Janet.  More Gas Hogs.  "He's prepared to offer 1000Ͼ if you beat up* the inventor* Tendai the Spike* at the old nuclear plant*.

"What's Tao got against Tendai?" she asked, barely interested.  A thousand chips would be nice, though.  She could buy a flamethrower for that much, and have some chips left for moonshine.

"Not your concern, degenerate!" the weird woman hissed.  "If you don't do it, you'll be run out of* Blacksand Reach.  No business here!"

Janet looked around at the rusted hulks and blasted buildings and shrugged, trying to ignore the shadowy figures that have been lurking this whole conversation. "Don't threaten me with a good time.  I'm getting tetanus just standing here. But sure, I'll tenderize Tendai for ya.  Where is this nuclear plant?"

The cultist laughed, "In Fargo* of course!"

Janet's bile surged as she thought of that nuclear wasteland.  "Okay, but Tao's kitting me out with a hazmat suit first.  I got too many rads already."  

TO BE CONTINUED???

If you want to see more of this sort of thing, head over to the polls on the Community tab and vote before Sunday evening!

Thanks to you, our first week was overwhelmingly successful!  We're close to 700% funded, and within striking distance ($837) of the first and most important stretch goal, to get Matthew on the project full time to complete art and layout.

Then at $7000, we'll add some bonus pages with a Brian Colin (of Vast Grimm) original monster and a sneak peek at some other critters and rivals you'll see in the future final Wasteland Degenerates hardcover.

And at $8000 I'll have amassed enough money in dog shelter donations to convince my good friend, Stuart Gorman, to create a random character generator for the WastelandDegenerates.com website.  That's right, he will only accept payment in donations to the dog shelter, because Dogs are Good Dogs.

Once we start unlocking goals I'll run a poll to see what else you might want to see.  Vehicle or degenerate standees?  Wooden tokens? A random VEHICLE generator? T-shirts?  The possibilities are... uh, not endless, but there's a lot of them!

Finally, I'll be doing an interview very soon for the Wandering Monster podcast, so keep your eyes on that space!

- Scott C. McDonald

For... reasons... I have added discounted tiers for retailers, in case stores want to buy more than five extra zines.

If folks want bulk in other items, please let me know!

We're closing in on $4000 raised so far, with... uh... 4 minutes left to get the early bird bonus of a poster with a James M. Ward tribute on one side and an adventure on the back.

Thank you all so much!  We're doing great!

EDIT: Fivefour minute warning was not enough.  To apologize, I've added a new pledge tier in case you still want to get the Early Bird poster, but it's limited supply; only 100 available!

Thank you, everybody for pitching in to help make my dream a reality!  

Now, I know the first stretch goal is a big one... $6000 for me to bring Matthew on full time to work on finishing the spreads, but if we can pull it off, we'll be months closer to getting the book into your grimy paws.  In addition, work on this book also speeds up the final hardcover version, which will use much of the same character creation and combat spreads, but will also need the in-book scenario, lore pages, cataclysms, enemy stat blocks, random mission generator, and sidekicks (among other things).

So if you know someone who may be into this, please send them the link!  All I want to do is make cool stuff for fellow gamers, so help me out if you can!

I can't wait to see where this goes next.